IN Residence
Another Terra – Home Away From Home
Another Terra / Home Away From Home is a collective exhibition showing a series of original works realized on the occasion of the Milan Design Week 2012 by the designers invited to the annual workshop part of the IN Residence project. The same year the exhibition was showed also in Basel during Design Miami/Basel, at the Venice Biennale and at Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk. The theme from which the exhibition concept has been inspired provides the chance to think specifically about the way in which human beings are related to the objects around them, which they use on an everyday basis, probing into a radically different environmental context from that of our own everyday experience. The quest for and eventual discovery of a “Super Earth” – as astronomers call it – may be considered an époque-making event, as well as an extraordinary goal for space research in the world scientific community. Inspired by this research activity – that has led to the recent discovery during the NASA Kepler mission of the existence of a planet that orbits around the “inhabitable zone” of a star similar to the Sun – the exhibition centers its attention on the relationship between a human being and the objects that would make up part of daily life, in another context different to that on Earth.
If, by choice or by necessity, we had to envisage life on some other planet other than Earth, what kind of “minimal hand luggage” would we take with us on our journey to other galaxies or a different celestial body with acceptable living conditions for mankind? What kind of traits and properties would we expect of the only “accessory” we are allowed to have with us when landing on some New World for the first time? Would we prefer to have what we consider to be a useful “device” or, in other words, serving some specific function considered to be a priority or would we rather have something of great symbolic value, perhaps also with sentimental connotations? And, what’s more, what kind of value or ideal should this constructed object actually embody? What kind of message should it convey? What kind of story might it tell? The installation project for the exhibition will involve displaying the individual works through a sequence of “capsules”, which, in accordance with what the basic concept evokes, ought to represent the vectors by means of which the objects are packed and sent off to the new planet.
Venice
Basel
Kortrijk
